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well, that is a really bad marketing move. someone had a drink or .... 20 ?
I am grateful for it as long as it lasted and they better get this redownload ready asap if they wanna win me over for whatever they are gonna do next. Maybe they burnt all their money on TW2 and have to close it until its release....

If they move over to a Steam-type system, then I will be leaving them I'm afraid - if I wanted something like Steam, I'd use Steam, many games are a comparable price on there. No-DRM was what differentiated them from the rest of the market, and without that I wonder how they will market themselves.

If it is marketing stunt, it's a pretty bad one - I can't think of another company that announced a major announcement by pre-empting it with "we're closing. Oh no we're not!". I mean, can you imagine Amazon or HMV Online doing something like this?

Oh, and if anyone here has the GOG executable for Arx, Gothic 1 & 2, Freespace 2, Divine Divinity, and Beyond Good and Evil, send them my way. Those were my favorite games I bought there, and I'd love to have them back.

My guess for best case scenario would be that they've been bought out by a big publisher who won't change much, but have forced a sudden migration to their servers, and want to rejig the site so it has advertising preferences for their games.

Son of a bitch.... Good thing I have copies of the setup files for the games I bought. The note on their page is confusing to me. On the one hand they are saying they are closing down the services, but on the other they are saying
"oh we're not going away, we're just changing" ???

According to this, it's a marketing stunt for them coming out of 'Beta' and moving in to the full version, possibly with some sort of client. The phrasing of 'We've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form' sort of supports that.

Well, this sucks. I had just gotten into them. As long as I get to download my games (which I will, apparently), then I'll be okay (still ticked off, though), because I bought a bunch of stuff I hadn't gotten to download yet. Hopefully something good will come from this.

That's the hope I'm clinging to. Plus, it might be an insignificant thing, but they just changed the icon of the website (the one that shows up in the tabs, at least on Chrome) today. Why do that if they were just shutting down? And why not give all of their members and visitors a heads-up before the actual closing? It doesn't make any sense.

Seriously? You think whoever at GOG that runs the twitter account isn't in on it? Or that 24 hours after Suddenly they're in dire straits and need to change how they do business or shut down? If anything, the borderline schizophrenic change in tone on their twitter proves that it's a stunt.

Considering it seems like they were bought out by a bigger company, it's very possible that the new guys could've gone in raising a shitstorm, forcing them to shut down for immediate changes. Once again unlikely, but...eh.

I do see where you're coming from, though. I just don't want to admit to what the evidence is pointing towards. It'd be about the most careless and unprofessional thing GOG could do just for the sake of some stupid revamp. A 24 hour notice for prolonged website maintenance would be understandable. As would some bleeding heart letter to the fans asking for support during financial difficulties. Pretty much anything with a little forewarning would've been nice. But like I said before, this WE'RE DOING GREAT UH OH IT IS OVER THANKS FOR SUPPORTING GOG KTHXBYE or is it thing just isn't a good idea if it's indeed what they're doing.

Well, this stinks! They were one of the last game vendors I actually supported and wanted to see succeed! Guess it is back to buying all my games used, to avoid supporting the publishers and having to pay a premium for older titles.

NOW WHY CAN'T I GET MY **** GAMES I PAID FOR?? Just kidding! I was smart enough to save them all locally. I am seriously kicking myself for not buying Blood 1+ all the expansions for $5.99 though. That was a heck of a deal. I was gonna do it as soon as I found the time to complete the used copy of Blood I picked up a few months before gog started selling it!

On a more positive note, all of my games magically still work. They didn't self-destruct, or fail to contact big brother in the process of spying on me, or anything! It is like I'm still in 1996!

What was so great about computers in 1996? You had to turn a hand crank for half an hour to get them to start. And what'd you get for all that effort? Nothing. There wasn't any porn on the internet yet, so why even bother?

And even if there were, you couldn't do anything about it, cuz your arm was too tired from turning that crank.

One thing we had in 1996: privacy. That feature of computing has pretty much died with the constant net connections we all have now. Even games are requiring them to play these days. Gog maintained this feature.

... and for the record, my 1996 computer had a big fat power switch that you had to physically move to get it to start (and shut down!). We had none of this fancy ACPI stuff.

Dumb question (firstly because speculation seems like a bad idea, secondly because I still don't think this is all just a stunt, and thirdly because I could be flat-out wrong), but... is that favicon the same as is was before?

I know the logo is slightly different, but I'm sure they have loads of those sitting around. Changing the favicon as well seems excessive, though. The problem is that I don't remember for certain what it used to look like, but the current one just seems different to what ever it was.

This whole page may simply be using an old place-holder site template, though, logo and icon included. The source indicates it was written with Frontpage, so they obviously didn't repurpose their normal site code.

It still makes no sense. The only thing I can think of that would force such an abrupt closure is some kind of legal issue, but that page says they've been discussing it for "quite some time".